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Posted on August 28, 2023 | 118 Comments
In this post, I’m going to finish my present mini-cycle about emerging class conflicts in the countryside, before turning to writing about my new book. So, unlike my book, I won’t be discussing below what George Monbiot gets wrong about the food and farming system. Instead, I discuss something completely different – namely, what George Monbiot gets wrong about domestic energy. But since my focus is on rural class conflict, what’s ultimately important is not so much what George Monbiot gets right or wrong as what his views reveal about some of the larger political winds now blowing.
This is the relevant article in which Monbiot sets out his position on domestic energy. It has a confessional and redemptive structure of a kind increasingly prevalent in his writing. In it, he describes how he installed woodburning stoves in his house some time ago, thinking that this was an environmentally sound choice. But he now thinks this was a mistake – indeed, a shameful one – because (1) firewood is often of questionable provenance, (2) research has shown that woodstoves emit high levels of health-damaging particulate matter, and (3) there are now better heating options available such as air source heat pumps. He thinks that woodstoves should now be banned, with help provided for the very few people who don’t have an alternative source of heating.
Arguably, I fall into that category. About twenty years ago we planted seven acres of trees on our holding (tree-planting is another of George’s bugbears, but anyway…) We did it under a Forestry Commission scheme which insisted on a 3x3m spacing. This means that I now have a lot of small to medium size trees of impeccable local provenance that need thinning, many being of little use for anything other than firewood. We also planted quite a bit of firewood pollards, and the carbon is accumulating in our woodlands year by year. We’re not, in short, short of wood. So when we built our home (which is pretty well insulated, but does need some additional heat) installing a woodstove with a back boiler for winter heating and hot water seemed a wise choice.
We’re not connected to the electricity grid on our holding. Instead, we generate our own electricity with the help of twenty photovoltaic panels, a small wind turbine on the end of a 9m scaffolding pole, four seriously large batteries, and an array of complex electronics that would have made even Michael Faraday’s brain ache. It is by any standards an extremely high-tech and high-capital bit of gizmology that throughout most of the year enables us to live an energy-profligate lifestyle almost as thoughtlessly as any other modern consumer. But on the kind of still and cloudy midwinter days that make you want to warm your bones by the fire, our inverter barely kicks out enough electricity to keep the lights on. The 1-4kW of electric power that I understand is needed to energise a heat pump would be out of the question.
Now, I confess our situation is quite unusual, and I agree with Monbiot that in view of the questionable provenance of imported firewood and the health impacts of wood combustion, in most situations there’s probably a good case for retiring the woodstove and choosing another option. But in some situations, that may not be the case – and I suspect these situations will become more frequent in the future.
The question of how we’re going to energise future societies seems a more intractable one to me even than my normal focus on the difficulties of how we’re going to feed them – and, despite the high-tech ease of it, my off-grid lifestyle dramatizes that to me in a way that grid-connected folk may be less apt to notice. While we can generate enough electricity most of the year to run such things as computers, phones, freezers, washing machines and an electrically-powered delivery trike, we can’t generate enough to run an electric car, an air-source heat pump or a microbial bioreactor. Looking at my high-capital array of electric gizmology that can’t even fully fund a modern end-consumer lifestyle, let alone the multiple layers of industrial production underlying it, doesn’t suggest to me that the world of air-source heat pumps, electric cars and electrically-energised food that the ecomodernists like to project looks feasible.
A neutral observer in the ecomodernist-vs-agrarian-localist debate might opine that a world of woodstoves and homesteads doesn’t look too feasible either. Maybe so. Certainly on the energy front, it seems to me that humanity faces big questions about feasible energy sources. Neither wood nor anything else seems likely to cut it at scale at anything like present levels of consumption. Still, if you took a fifty-acre field in many a wealthy country like the UK and gave it to ten or twenty households to turn into homesteads, I think it would soon be sprouting a lot of trees which would contribute to the energetic and material autonomy of its residents as part of lifestyles considerably lower in energy needs than their urban counterparts. I’d like to imagine that a bureaucrat charged with figuring out economic sustainability for a post-fossils future who was shown around such holdings would think “great, at least that’s a few less people whose energy needs I have to worry about”.
But who am I kidding? That’s not how modern bureaucracy works. It operates more along the lines of Monbiot’s sensibilities – banning things rather than adjusting itself to unusual situations and emerging local possibilities.
Doubtless there are those who would demur at my ‘few less people’ suggestion and mock the diseconomies of small scale involved in piddling off-grid setups like mine. I discussed this line of reasoning in a recent blog post, in which I mentioned this review paper about a 100% renewables transition . A couple of passing remarks in that paper drew my attention, just as a smudge of cloud on the horizon foretelling bad weather can likewise draw the eye. One of these was that district heating and cooling systems are much more efficient than heat pumps installed on individual buildings (p.78198). Another was that integration of off-grid mini and micro grids is essential for meeting energy growth needs (p.78199).
Is it too much to piece together the radical urbanism that underlies ecomodernism from the snippets of energetic and food system concern I’ve outlined so far? Woodburners are bad for people’s health, so ban them. Farming is bad for wildlife health, so minimise that (ref Monbiot’s Regenesis). Domestic energetic efficiency can only be achieved from district systems and grid tie-ins, so concentrate people in urban areas and mandate energy centralization. No surprise perhaps that Monbiot’s associates at RePlanet argue for 90% global urban residence by 2100.
In his recent letter to The Land Magazine, Monbiot critiques what he calls “the conspiracy ideation now deployed against almost all environmental measures”, of which my preceding paragraph could no doubt be seen by some as an example. The Land’s editor Mike Hannis gave a good response on the conspiracy ideation front to Monbiot’s rather wild accusations in relation to the particular issues they were debating, but there’s also a case for a wider view.
‘Conspiracy ideation’ invokes a world of secret alliances, deliberate media falsification, explicit plans to assume control, cackling men in hidden backrooms writing plans to rule the world. That’s not what I think is happening. On the contrary, ecomodernism’s environmental proposals are pretty much out in the open and consonant with the developmental tendencies of modern, high-energy societies: urban, consumerist, high-energy, high-tech and putatively ‘land sparing’. My problem with this is not that it’s conspiratorial, but that it’s wrong-headed and unfeasible.
All the same, there are some odd crossovers occurring in politics, as I’ve remarked here before. In the past, people on the left tended to the view that the private sector in general and private corporations in particular were motivated by self-interest against the wider wellbeing of the people. People on the right tended to the view that governments and bureaucracies were motivated by self-interest against the wider wellbeing of the people. Over time, I’ve come to think that both these views are largely true. But, as I’ve already said, I don’t think they’re conspiratorially true. They’re not some secret message hidden in the plot. They are the plot.
It always seemed a bit odd to me that conservatives and libertarians were so often pro-corporate and pro-capitalist, because there’s nothing very conservative or liberatory about these organisational forms. Increasingly, conservative critiques of corporate capitalism are emerging. But meanwhile, there seems to be a growing connivance on the left at the confluence between big-scale government and corporate agency, a point I discussed here recently. When and how did it become conspiratorial for a left-winger to criticise the collected works of Bill Gates? When and how did it make sense, if Mike Hannis’s allegations in The Land Magazine are correct, for George Monbiot to make common cause with an organisation underwritten by a hedge fund with investments in oil companies and arms manufacturers, and for him to write bonkers sentences like “Even fossil fuels, terrible as their impact is, are less damaging than the public health disaster [of woodstoves]”.
I daresay that woodstoves have caused their fair share of poor health over the millennia, but they haven’t caused the full-on global cataclysm we now face after a few short centuries of mass fossil fuel combustion. Now that we know, thanks to the wonders of modern science, about aspects of the poor health arising from woodstoves, I’m all in for listening to experts about ways to mitigate them in my wood burning practices. I’m not all in for saying goodbye to my stove and moving to the city. At all. Especially since it seems we don’t actually know what burden of ill health is caused by woodstoves. Whereas we have some inkling when it comes to our modern fossil-fuelled urban civilization.
I’m not a hard libertarian. I don’t, for example, object to laws mandating the wearing of seatbelts in cars. When you sit inside a car you make yourself an accessory to a vast collective modern architecture of death that you could never effect as a lone individual. It’s hard to object if the society underwriting this morbid topology adopts a few feeble efforts towards death-mitigation via seatbelt legislation. But to me, woodstoves are different. True, I didn’t manufacture my own one – partly (though not only) because they’re already subject to an absurd amount of legislative jiggery-pokery connected with assuring the powers that be that they won’t be used for burning coal. But while I’m under no illusions about the degree of my dependence on the modern fossil-fuelled capitalist economy, generating warm air and water from woodland I planted myself … and from a woodstove that I could potentially have made myself … and managing the ecology of the woodland as I go, making myself a protagonist within its numerous wild dramas, are parts of a low-carbon autonomy I’ve engineered for myself on which I’ll take my stand over some actuarial notion that an air-source heat pump hailing from God knows where and using electricity from God knows where is ‘better for the environment’ or for my health.
If I thought ecomodernist urbanism had good prospects of success technically and politically, then I suppose I might reluctantly allow myself to be corralled into a city, plug myself further into the grid and alienate myself further from that encompassing ecology. But I don’t think it’ll work technically – not least because (paralleling manufactured food scenarios), there’s an enormous ‘clean’ energy investment required of all these technologies in order to get a return, and no clear picture of where it’s going to come from. There’s an energy investment, too, in my wood-harvesting efforts, but a much lesser one.
So it seems to me better to prepare the ground for the more likely future of distributed, low-tech ruralism to which the failure of ecomodernist alternatives will in any case default. The difficulties with distributed ruralism are intractable enough, so we might as well get started with them now. At least with the distributed approach, the problem of concentrated particulate matter from woodstoves is dissipated, along with many other kinds of pollution problem.
On the political side of things, how to establish a society that generates and tolerably governs distributed low-tech ruralism is a tricky question which I’ve pondered at length over the years on this blog without answering especially satisfactorily. One thing I’ve learned is that a growing minority of people have, like me, landed on the virtues of a small farming or homesteading life due to their critiques of mainstream contemporary society – but our critiques are often radically different from one another, possibly more so than the political differences characteristic among those contentedly plugged in to urban modernity. We homesteading refuseniks get along fine if we keep the conversation to preferred fencing systems, remedies for caterpillar infestations and suchlike, but it can get hairy if we stray into politics.
Still, that’s the measure of the challenge, and into those politics we must boldly go. If George gets his way and they ban woodstoves, that’s a red line for me. I’ll continue harvesting my firewood and burning it in my stove until they drag me away. I hope the smoke curling skywards from my chimney will act as messenger to other refuseniks, burning other fires nearby. A smoke-signalled invitation to a difficult communion between us, yet one that I’m convinced will ultimately be more fruitful than vain hopes for a safely district-heated urbanism and an air-source-heat-pumped humankind.
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The thing about this is that it’s faintly ridiculous to paint all woodstoves as equally bad. Rocket mass heaters, for example, can be constructed in such a way as to be extremely clean-burning and pretty much smokeless. You’ll still want a chimney, but with enough fine tuning you might not have much of a smoke plume. Just saying.
I do like the idea of district heating or hot water, but probably more on the scale of a village than city. I think last time this came up I mentioned blocks of flats in Bermondsey that have communal hot water; I didn’t mention that these are about four stories tall but have sizeable courtyards in the middle. I could certainly envision a similar structure with the courtyard used for growing vegetables or maybe livestock (fairly trivial to keep larger predators out!) and the outside area used for trees. I’m sure I’d never get planning permission for anything like that, though.
There is also a good argument that replacing all or most of the ancient gas boilers with newer, more efficient versions would save more carbon at less material and financial cost than replacing a smaller number of them with heat pumps. Solar water pre-heaters would also be a relatively cheap intervention, though at some times of year they wouldn’t work well. In our own home, putting the downstairs radiators on the outside walls instead of the inside ones would have been a good plan, and even making that change would probably be cheaper than putting in a heat pump (though it would involve substantial re-fitting of the kitchen).
I do like trombe walls for heating (and a degree of cooling): they take up rather less space than a heat pump and they work when there’s no electricity. We can’t easily add such a device to our rented home (I am considering one for the allotment shed though) but we have learned that if we open the loft hatch on summer nights, the residual heat in the loft acts as a solar chimney and we can draw in really quite a lot of cool air from outside. Meanwhile, this winter we put quite a lot of rock down on the greenhouse floor (I grow in discarded loft water tanks in there), largely because our previous floor choice was such an excellent rodent habitat (woodchips but out of the rain and inaccessible to the allotment cats = prime nesting area), and it does seem to have evened out the thermal swings a bit, though I still wouldn’t want to sleep in there of a winter night.
Another off-grid energy source I’m fascinated by is the Jean Pain-style composting system that yields both heat (in water pipes that go through the compost pile) and methane (which can be collected and used for cooking). If my compost heaps at the allotment are anything to go by, it takes really quite a lot of carbon to produce heat effectively, and keeping the moisture and oxygen levels right is a non-trivial matter (though pretty easy if your goal is “this should break down a lot over the next several weeks). Plus there’s the energy to turn all that wood into woodchips first. (I still haven’t done anything about a bike-powered flail/thresher/chipper/shredder, though it’s on my “someday” list.)
Methane is a bit easier, and there are various videos on YouTube of people harvesting methane from anaerobic food waste digesters using, essentially, a barrel with a tight-fitting lid, a few valves, a car tyre tube (or that’s what it looks like to me) and a camp stove. I am not sure I would want to try it myself (sounds like it could get a bit explodey if I mess it up), but it might make a decent alternative to burning wood for cooking in summer, especially if you have solar hot water for washing.
“bike-powered flail/thresher/chipper/shredder”…
I have built a pedal-powered thresher, which in my opinion is better than hand flailing, but I have my doubts about pedal powered chipper/shredder.
We must remember that we humans only produce about 100 watts of sustained output.
I have used a 3 horsepower (1500 watts) chipper, and it was useless. Chipper/shreddering is a lot of work.
My experience of putting pedal power on things suggests to me that chipping/shredding is best done with an axe or machete.
Yeah, it’s… not likely to work very well, though I guess with enough gearing it might be possible to kindof crush small prunings.
Probably way more efficient to burn them and then chip the resulting charcoal by stomping on it, though. Or just pole the branches up somewhere nice and damp, and let our fungal friends do the work of breaking down all that lignin.
In the meantime, while tree surgeons are willing to deliver woodchips I’ll take what I can get. My spouse knows a tree surgeon who runs his van (and I think his chipper too?? on biodiesel made from used cooking oil, but that isn’t exactly a low-input process either.
Also: I would have to see data, and it could honestly go either way, but I am not sure woodstoves are as bad for my lungs as, say, particulates from car tyres and brakes, and the various pollutants spewed out at the tailpipe. But it’s easy to identify rich people with an Aga (ah, the mainframe of woodstoves…) and paint them as having a luxuriantly bourgeoisie lifestyle, while saying those driving cars are “working people” who couldn’t possibly do without, while not actually providing the kind of public transport (outside of major cities) that would enable more people to give up the massive inconvenience of their cars. (The actual precariat, meanwhile, are delivering pizza using e-bikes these days, and probably kept the heating off last winter due to cost, which likely will have contributed to respiratory and cardiac illness.)
Personally I find this sort of self flagellating stuff egotistical and not a little useless. It is a type of urban vs rural gaslighting that serves very little purpose.
Myself and my partner run a small organic place on a mountain side, we live off grid, not because we want to but if we don’t generate our own power nobody else is going to supply us.
Equally we are the caretakers of 26 hectares of mainly unmanaged young garrigue type forest. It got thrown in with the farm, as land is cheap round here.
Now I would be the last person to argue that an individual solar system is an efficient means to power our place, I would much rather belong to a community owned and run mixed renewable system, but I can’t. In Winter, like you the impressive solar system means that the basement takes the place of the fridge and early nights and candle light rules the long evenings.
Heating takes the form of wood stoves, from wood cut in an attempt to develop the forest into a sustainable system, with the idea of raising animals, poultry and possible pigs, under the canopy.
Fire, of the wild variety also plays a big part in our work in the forest, and indeed of our exploitation of the land in general.
Cost also is a factor, with aged firewood running to 85 to 95 euro a cubic metre, and our consumption some Winters running to 8 to 10 cubic metres. Bought in wood represents a big junk of cash from a small budget.
Work flows, as producers of aromatic herbs, late November to early February are a down period in which all the things that did not get done the past season, and the preparation for the next season are done, well sort of the list tends to be longer than allocated and energy available.
Weather and safety conditions, the hopefully, wet Winter months represent the only really safe conditions to work the forest without the risk of starting fires.
So like every able person in our commune, average income, 12, 300 euro per anum, Winter is time for cutting wood for the next Winter.
It is also a time for communal work, portions of forest are given over to be cut for those unable to cut their own wood, age, disability, child care and other responsibilities, which we collectively cut and deliver.
This type of individual and collective work is common in the local canton, but is dying out in cantons with large, mainly Northern European migrant populations or second home.
Wood particles are of little importance, other issues are a tad more pressing.
I’m still reading, but just have to pause a moment for a comment. I’ll prolly comment again, as I’m wont to do. 😉
This article is just as scintillating as most of your writing is, Chris! It inspires me with gratitude for your good work.
“All the same, there are some odd crossovers occurring in politics, as I’ve remarked here before. In the past, people on the left tended to the view that the private sector in general and private corporations in particular were motivated by self-interest against the wider well-being of the people. People on the right tended to the view that governments and bureaucracies were motivated by self-interest against the wider wellbeing of the people. Over time, I’ve come to think that both these views are largely true. But, as I’ve already said, I don’t think they’re conspiratorially true. They’re not some secret message hidden in the plot. They are the plot.”
I could not agree more. And I have a theory, of sorts, for why this is so. My theory has it that the modern state emerged in a co-evolutionary relationship with “business,” and — more recently — the corporate form of business. Each, the state and business/corporations, not only borrowed inspiration from one another in their design, but emerged in integration with one another, so that these two evolved as a sort of two-headed creature with one torso, set of arms and legs (a Siamese twin). We tend to think that government and “business” are two distinct institutional forms. But when I look at these two in a systems orientation view, I see them utterly intertwined, and quite the same creature with the same basic ideology, structure and patterns of behavior.
Ecomodernism (which goes also by other names, as you know) is a cultural manifestation of this singular creature.
What has helped me quite a lot in understanding this creature is to explore this beast with an eye to seeing patterns of centripetal versus centrifugal power relations. I believe this Siamese twin has a strong pattern of centripetal power accumulation, both political and economic. And in this way it can be understood as an expression of the Megamachine described by Fabian Scheidler -https://rword.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-megamachine
Centripetal power relations concentrates economic and political power in the hands of a few. Centrifugal power relations distributes it widely and diffusely, with empowering everyone being its ideal bullseye. Only centrifugal power relations can be truly democratic, as I see it.
Almost all of my political thought comes down to preferring centrifugal power relations (political and economic) to centripetal power relations. That is, I prefer to live in a local community which makes most of its own decisions (in egalitarian fashion, with egalitarian intent) about its own life. That is, I’m a decentralist (and democrat) of a rather radical sort. I would simply replace the Megamachine with functioning and functional villages, neighborhoods and households, inasmuch as this is possible. I’d do it in a basically bioregional way, which is to say that something like a federation of these smaller entities would work best within a bioregional scale and ethos at the next scale up from neighborhood and village.
I’m basically “anarchist light,” meaning I lean heavily in an anarchist direction without being a total a-hole about it. I hope.
I support Chris’s views on this issue, although I think there is a big difference between the use of woodstoves in rural areas and their increasing use in urban areas, where many are more of an interior design feature than people’s primary source of heating. Living on a sailing barge reduces our options and like Chris we have a stove that is our primary source of heating and which is also used for cooking. We burn wood that has been sourced locally from tree surgery. There are always going to be trade offs. Even if log burners produce particulate pollution, they don’t add to overall CO2 emissions. However this doesn’t mean burning wood is always a good option. Look at Drax which burns wood pellets that are manufactured and imported from countries where virgin forests are being cleared to provide the wood. If heat pumps are using electricity generated in this way they wouldn’t be seen as a good option.
“Even if log burners produce particulate pollution, they don’t add to overall CO2 emissions. However this doesn’t mean burning wood is always a good option. Look at Drax which burns wood pellets that are manufactured and imported from countries where virgin forests are being cleared to provide the wood. If heat pumps are using electricity generated in this way they wouldn’t be seen as a good option.”
Much depends on how much wood (and wood pellets) are being burned in proportion to the amount of forests which are sequestering carbon in the form of wood, etc. It’s largely a matter of the rate of burning.
I watched a good documentary on the wood pellet industry a while back. I’ll search for the web address and post it here if I can locate it.
One thing I learned during and since watching that documentary is that “proponents of wood burning often argue that it can be considered carbon-neutral if the amount of CO2 released during burning is eventually reabsorbed by new tree growth. This argument is based on the assumption that the carbon dioxide emitted during burning will be balanced out by the carbon dioxide absorbed by growing trees. However, this process takes time, and if trees are cut down faster than they can regrow, a net increase in atmospheric CO2 can occur.”
Some of this last paragraph was generated by ChatGPT — the portion in quotes. This information accords with my understanding.
I’d probably have said “will occur” rather than “can occur”.
Great post Chris – ‘God knows where’!
I’ve been at Henbant in North Wales – absolutely gorgeous little farm. Been letting everyone who I’ve weeded, planted, collected eggs and herded cows with know about Small Farm Future.
The discussion emerged of the ecomodernist vs local agrarianism and who would end up where regarding the big inherited land owners, and the Farmer was pretty adamant they’ll be on our side – they might not give up ownership but they’ll have us on the land.
The ongoing descent of Monbiot is sad and concerning. Is he a good gauge of an upper middle class position – a radical outlier of a sort of star trek on earth vision emerging in the professional classes?
It is concerning, but I don’t think Monbiot is representative — at least, the upper(-ish) middle class people I know are capable of engaging with a degree of nuance that goes significantly beyond “wood fires bad, heat pumps good”.
There may be a selection effect in place, though, as people who don’t manage nuance tend not to get along with me all that well.
https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html
Some actual figures .
This is the Texas grid , refresh the page and it gives current capacity and where that comes from , as Texas has the largest renewable capacity in the USA it shows when the wind blows and the sun shines plus the back up when it don’t . It has had trouble the last few weeks as day temps hit 45/ 49 degrees c with nights around 28 degrees c , a slightly warmer summer than usual by about 2 degrees c .
I have a heat pump combined ac unit , for heat it’s CRAP , as the temperature drops towards freezing it becomes less and less efficient until at around 5 degrees below freezing it quits ,( no heat in the air to be extracted ) . I bet the powers that be don’t know that .
I have my own woodlot and a stove with a catalytic converter , clean , warm and fantastic to back up to and have a warm in a cold day . Those that think heat pumps are the holy grail of space heating should have one fitted and freeze thru winter !
To add; you have in detail described the ersatz roots of eco modernism in the failed psychedelic revolution of the 60s, giving birth to Stuart Brand. We see also its adjacent position to silicon Valley, now big tech, and its aspirations to live forever. Monbiots narrative dynamic does clearly show a growing obsession with health and tech skewing in that direction.
What I can say, is that from all the people I meet, regardless of class, they see the common sense of a SFF. Having long stopped reading the Guardian, or watching any or little TV news, it’s dawning on me that anyone who talks or writes for a living is akin to a storyteller – an entertainer even. Hence Monbiot’s bitter contestations, his breath taking twists and gut wrenching sleights of hand. Like the doctors and professors of the last post – Tellers of the High Stories. (I might be influenced by Ridley Walker here!)
Like you say, the culprit is capital and the end is enclosure- the same forces that have arraigned for the last 500 years. Our organisation as a people is the only thing that can change. Henbant had a copy of Lean Logic by David Fleming in the cafe/library who’s argument, that collapse is inevitable, is tight. Is there a dark blairite 3rd way of tech we’re not articulating here? Is it simply an eighteenth century genocide by famine and impoverishment?
The young and old volunteers, campers and lodgers I met on the farm have a very different view – vibrant, hard working and up for the challenge.
The thing about Modernity is that it’s not very environmentally friendly.
Monbiot can call out woodburners (an old technology but still created in the industrial age) but what are the health implications for those kids mining rare earth metals in DR Congo, so that Monbiot can write an article on his laptop?
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-turbine-blades-dump/
From savior to Dump in 15 years , renewable ? Nope just dump the trash on some one else’s door step !
The same sort of thing was on my mind as I read Monbiot’s piece, John. The high tech grid that’s required to manufacture and energize my own heat pump is responsible for environmental destruction on a gargantuan scale and contaminates the water, the air, and the soil with countless poisons. Those impacts are almost certainly felt most acutely in places far away from me, but that’s not to say that they don’t degrade my local environment, as well. That will no doubt improve to some degree if and when our energy grids are powered by renewable energy sources, but certainly not to the degree that some tech boosters would have us believe since so-called “clean” energy is anything but.
@Eric
It’s all just “bobbins”.
“You can’t have your green modernity and eat it”
We jave outsource much of our emissions to China. They manufacture (pollute) all the stuff that we consume (and used to manufacture here)
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-turbine-blades-dump/
@Ernie
Sorry, I meant Ernie, not Eric.
(Easy mistake to make by anyone in the UK who can remember the 1970s!)
@Diogenese10
Sorry. I just re-linked your post! D’oh!
I thought I’d seen it on another blog site. Drrrrrrr!
From another wood burner: couldn’t agree more. The government has several times tried to clamp down on private wood burning, while district heating facilities burn enormous quantities of biomass….
Regarding this quote: “It always seemed a bit odd to me that conservatives and libertarians were so often pro-corporate and pro-capitalist, because there’s nothing very conservative or liberatory about these organisational forms.” The Economist recently ran an article about how the Republicans in the US increasingly come accross as “anti-capitalist”.
“Come across” are the operative words here, Gunnar. Some of the intellectuals in the US rightwing
“post-liberal” movement (Patrick Deneen, for example) might actually mean some of the things that they say about tariffs, unions, etc that would qualify as anti-capitalist (at least in the neoliberal sense as advanced by The Economist)., but I sincerely doubt that the Republican politicians (J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, etc.) who have endorsed their critique see it as anything other than a potential path to personal advancement. They’ll play the game of faux populist demagoguery if it gets them the attention they crave, but they’ll continue to serve the interests of billionaire power brokers just as Republicans have always done. Where the intellectuals and politicians are on the same page, I’d say, is in their admiration for rightwing authoritarian politics in the style of Viktor Orbán.
Thank you for another great post, with a beautiful call to resistance at the end. And really, Monbiot wants to ban woodstoves now? Anyone who tried that here in Norway would probably have an armed rebellion on his or her hands, haha. At least it would bolster the rural populism and discontent that’s given the very pro-rural (and somewhat unintuitively named, but it refers to the left/right scale) Center Party such momentum in recent years.
One the one hand, heating with wood is a very ingrained (no pun intended) part of the culture here, and there’s a lively trade in firewood and quite a bit of personal production. A few years back, a quirky book about firewood stacking and traditional stove culture became a huge hit and a cultural phenomenon. On the other hand, since electricity was so cheap here during the later 20th century, a lot of homes were built with the assumption of heating with electric ovens. And many people have heat pumps these days.
I’ve been thinking about these issues lately myself, since having to burn so much wood each winter is a pretty big “weak point” both in terms of expenditures and actually having all that wood physically delivered when and if fossil fuels become expensive and scarce. Still, I’d rather choose that over having a heat pump and being dependent on the grid sticking around for the long term. And electricity prices have been very high in recent years for a variety of reasons, while firewood is still relatively cheap all things considered, so wood heat will probably come out ahead most years.
To be honest, it seems to me that living any kind of off-grid or low-energy life must be much easier in the tropics and subtropics, where you can use solar tech (both low and high) all year, don’t have to deal with snow and frost and don’t need to use energy for heating or cooling if you play your cards right. Still, the grass is always greener…
There’s not much of a coppice culture in Norway to my knowledge, but we’re blessed with an abundance of birch, which grows very quickly by tree standards and makes for excellent firewood. Still, I live in a rural area some way outside Oslo, and in my darker moments I sometimes wonder if large swathes of our local forests will be cut down when the industrial era winds down and all the city-dwellers have to switch to wood for their heat. Without having the numbers handy, I’d think the municipality and wider region could be self-sufficient in perpetuity, though. Even if we might have to burn a bit of spruce and fir in a pinch.
In any case, I’m open to the possibility that centralized systems could make sense in towns and cities, but banning woodburning stoves still strikes me as asinine. Compared to all our other problems, I can’t bring myself to be too concerned about health effects from woodsmoke, especially if it’s relatively dispersed in the countryside. And like Kathryn mentions, a comparison with pollution from cars or any of the other myriad toxins industrial society produces might be illuminating.
To be honest, it seems to me that living any kind of off-grid or low-energy life must be much easier in the tropics and subtropics, where you can use solar tech (both low and high) all year, don’t have to deal with snow and frost and don’t need to use energy for heating or cooling if you play your cards right.
I live in the tropics at 2300 ft elevation. It can’t get any better from a climate perspective. Humidity is fairly high, but daytime temps never get over 80F and the coldest, most bitter winter morning is around 50F. The average high is about 73F and the average low about 60F. I sleep under one light blanket half the year and two light blankets the other half.
We heat with wood about 3-4 months per year, but not every day during the heating season. The heater we use is a small, welded steel unit we brought over from the Olympic Peninsula when we moved here in 1986. It still works great. We burn about 1/2 cord a year for heat. We do this only because we have lots of wood on the property and, as we are in our mid-70s, my wife and I like a warmer house. When we were younger we only fired up the heater if it looked like the house temperature was going to stay in the low-60s all day.
Our house here has always been off-grid by necessity. Cheap solar panels and LED lights have been a real blessing from the last decade or so. It was a lot harder to be off-grid in 1986. We ran a generator a lot more then but now we hardly ever do.
Food grows all year here, too, including forage for the sheep. No haying or canning vegetables. It’s comfortable for a “lifeboat”.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again……. Rocket Stoves!!!
1/10th the wood required for the same output. Clean burn.
I’m a bit behind on my field trials to get mine to burn twigs cut into pellet size pieces. The rest of my life keeps getting in the way!
As for banning/health and all that. The pertol/diesel engine is a far bigger public health menace. I’m guessing George isn’t asking for them to be banned?
@ John Adams –
“As for banning/health and all that. The pertol/diesel engine is a far bigger public health menace. I’m guessing George isn’t asking for them to be banned?”
I have no idea where George lives, but I suspect he lives in some city, maybe London? I used to live in a rural area where population was very sparse, and my family burned wood for heat (and lived in a place which was mostly wooded, though we also had four acres of cleared pasture and some garden space beside). Wood smoke never accumulated or concentrated there, because there were so few of us, and there wasn’t a perpetual temperature inversion layer holding all the smoke down and still.
I imagine if everyone in a city heated their home with wood (unless it was burned in a rocket stove) the air would be pretty thick with smoke.
I think George ought to be rather embarrassed about how, in his ignorance, he wants to regulate the lives of those who live rurally. He comes off to me as someone who is very citified and who has never even visited rural places.
I think George is trying to “square the circle”
We can’t have modern cities without fossil fuels, particulate immisions, pollution and the poor health outcomes all this entails.
Banning wood burners is gesture politics. We aren’t all going to switch to wood and if we did the wood wouldn’t last long anyway.
I have moved on from rocket stoves to wood gasification stoves. The main advantage being that you can use them inside your house, but also slightly more efficient than rocket stove. And if you run it right you can end up with charcoal – for blacksmithing, BBQs or BECCs…
Our neighbour built ours (based on TLUD stove) out of a gas cylinder and a fire extinguisher, with a large exhaust pipe for a flue.
My understanding was that wood burners were ok-going-on-good if adjusted and used properly. (Like many other things).
And that ground source heat pumps are definitely good sustainable tech – but again only if tuned correctly and used in accordance with overall energy-literacy (i.e don’t just expect to use your radiators in the casual way that fossil heating is used). Problem is that most people are not energy-literate (no pressing reason for them to be so) and, more importantly, most people don’t have ground to put the heat pump in.
As to the psychology of George Monbiot – I’ll say something some other time.
[and WOW! I posted this and then got a message that I had 4 mins to edit it!]
“[and WOW! I posted this and then got a message that I had 4 mins to edit it!]”
If it can be set at 4 minutes, it can probably be set at 4 hours, which would be way better.
Unlike heat pumps, wood stoves are a resilient way to heat (and cook). Heat pumps don’t work when the grid is down, and they are so much more complex, with moving parts, pressurized gases, and electrical components, any of which can fail, and then the heating system is inoperable until a specialized technician diagnoses the problem and obtains (if possible) the replacement parts. The lifespan of an air-source heat pump is reportedly around 15 years before they wear out and need a new one to be manufactured and purchased again (and again…)
The UK government subsidizes the burning of wood pellets to generate electricity which could be used to run a heat pump to heat a house. The more resilient alternative is to ‘cut out the middleperson’ and use a wood stove to heat a house (preferably located outside of any cities due to the emissions of particulates).
“Drax burns over 7 million tonnes of wood pellets each year to produce electricity. This requires 14 million tonnes of green wood, because pellets must be dried and compressed before they can be burned as fuel… More than one-third of the wood it burns is from large whole trees… It has a thermal efficiency of around 38% , which means for every 10 trees burned, 6 are wasted as uncaptured heat, which is released into the atmosphere or to the nearby River Ouse as cooling water… Despite being subsidised as a clean energy source, Drax releases more than 400 tonnes of particulates into the atmosphere each year… It has already received over £4 billion in subsidies and it’s estimated it will get almost £6 billion more by the time its subsidy agreement with the government ends in 2027.”
https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/insight/future-drax-old-inefficient-damaging-and-expensive
“Despite being subsidised as a clean energy source, Drax releases more than 400 tonnes of particulates into the atmosphere each year”
Drax’s annual report for 2020 (on page 52) discloses that their *burning* of wood pellets in Yorkshire resulted in 419 tonnes of particulates emissions, while the *production* of their wood pellets resulted in an additional 489 tonnes of particulates emissions (in the US), which adds up to 908 tonnes for 2020.
https://www.drax.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Drax_AR2020.pdf
Yep and they are clear felling American forests to send pellets to the UK , habitats massacred but nothing from the greens , the clear felling is causing huge amounts of erosion , water pollution and silting of rivers ,you hear a lot in the news about East coast floods there is a reason for that , the forests that held back the water and released it steadily over time are gone .
the greens closed a whole industry that managed forests in the Pacific North West over a owl which has near disappeared now because unmanaged forests burn fiercely and they have erosion problems too .
And what’s more, my husband who is a technician who repairs and maintains heat pumps sees that many companies who service these things just “top off” the refrigerant gas when it is difficult to find the leak. And every one of them will fail and often leak all the gas at some point in their life cycle. He has a paper that attempts to quantify the emissions associated with all that and I’ll ask him later on so I can link it. Those gasses are far worse than woodstove particles.
Here is a direct quote from Birmingham Energy Institute paper https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-eps/energy/Publications/Clean-Cold-and-the-Global-Goals.pdf
“But if cooling is vital, it is also dirty. One
estimate suggests that refrigeration and
air conditioning cause 10% of global CO2
emissions5 – including both energy
emissions and leaks of highly potent HFC
refrigerant gases – which is three times
that attributed to aviation and shipping
combined.6”
Note, heat pumps use the same technology as cooling systems. I am sure left brain thinkers like Monbiot will point to new refridgerants as a simple solution. There are problems with these solutions. While 410A does not damage the ozone it is a bad green house gas. The newest technology solves this problem but creates other problems: see this summary
https://eia-international.org/news/new-family-of-synthetic-refrigerant-gases-poses-potential-dangers-to-human-health-and-the-environment/
I’m in the heating/plumbing game.
It makes me laugh when I walk in a house and look at all the “green” kit that people have had installed.
How anyone can believe that any off this stuff is “green” or environmentally friendly is beyond me.
Heat Pumps. Good luck with that one. People can’t even pay their energy bills, how on earth are they going to afford to install a heat pump???? It’s not just a straight swap for a gas or oil boiler. There is a lot of upgrading of the existing system that is required.
Plus the National Grid will need a major upgrade. Electricity transmission is very inefficient as well.
I’m afraid, that it’s just not going to happen.
Hi Chris and John Adams,
As a long term reader, but first time commenter, I can add a few thoughts on rocket stoves.
I’ve used the book by Ianto Evans and Leslie Jackson to construct a rocket stove mass heater in an outside shed. The 10 times more efficient factor, mentioned in the book, takes into account the use of a horizontal flue to heat a thermal mass like a bench, to warm the person rather than the space. I’d like to hear if anyone has had this design passed by building control in the UK. I understood the max length for a horizontal flue allowed is 150mm.
However, even without the long horizontal flue the design makes for a very efficient burn, with little or no apparent smoke.
The Tawi Stove from Carbon Farmers works on the rocket stove principle as a cooking stove which also turns twigs into biochar. This was a new one to me when I saw it for the first time at the Malvern Show.
@Frank
My rocket stove is a D.I.Y project and not a mass heater type, so no horizontal flue.
I’m guessing Building Control and my house insurance would have something to say about it.
(I’m not sure how Building Control would ever find out and House Insurance won’t know unless your house burns down!!!! I know plenty of people who have put conventional wood burners in without Building compliance or a HETAS certificate.)
I’m thinking that when it gets to the point that it’s the rocket stove or no heating at all, Building Control and House Insurance won’t be a thing.
The stove burns super hot and clean on a few bits of split pallet. The burn chamber is only about 2″ x 2″ so needs attending regularly to keep it fed.
Hence the experiments with pellets/twigs. Pellets can be gravity fed into the burn chamber. I don’t want to pay for pellets though, so am trying with pellet size bits of twig.
I can dry freshly cut twig on a black tarpaulin in the sunshine in under a day. I have no end of twig supply from my garden plants.
Been having a few problems with oxygen supply to the burn chamber of my specific set-up. Plenty of other rocket stoves out there work fine on pellets, so hopefully I’ll get the set-up right.
I’ve made my latest alterations but haven’t had the time to have a test fire.
It’s all good fun.
Hi Frank
Thanks for mentioning the Tawi stove — it looks pretty versatile for the price, and in my (allotment) context producing biochar while cooking and not producing much (or any) smoke is definitely a good thing.
I’d not heard of the Tawi stove but it looks interesting. Got very interested in rocket mass heaters a few years back but ended up with a woodburning stove because I couldn’t see how to put one in the house and still get insurance – but I still think long term they offer the best solution to heating – peasant houses in northern china had a heated platform (called a Kang I believe) that was basically a mass of brick/clay heated by a cook stove and on which the family slept at night and sat during the day. I think the future might look more like the past than the future imagined by many
Thanks for a very interesting set of comments, and welcome to new commenters. A few remarks and take homes from me arising from them:
– There are numerous options for space & water heating, appropriate to different situations … sometimes including woodstoves. Amen!
– There are also different options for woodland management, depending on the biome, and they’re relevant to firewood harvesting – fascinating to hear of management regimes relating to garrigue & boreal forest alongside my situation of moist temperate deciduous coppice woodland.
– Thinking about Drax and other industrial-scale technologies compared to offgrid living and farm firewood systems underscores the importance of scale and ecological feedback, a point I often make concerning the benefits of agrarian localism. People tend to focus on ‘efficiency’ in terms of scale-neutral output per unit input. But in a society of farmsteads, per capita *use* is likely to be less, potentially more than offsetting lower output/input. Also, homesteaders will more likely ensure the wood resource is renewable than commercial loggers (this bears on James’s point about whether a net GHG increase ‘can’ or ‘will’ occur).
– Re commercial loggers, I’m not convinced Pacific northwest logging has been done sustainably as a general rule. However, I agree that it’s a farce to call Drax’s fuel ‘clean’. Whereas my woodland is certified clean … by me (the only really trustworthy certification authority IMO is oneself, in relation to one’s own activities…)
– …well, clean-ish. I use a petrol chainsaw to fell & buck the trees in the winter. Then I use a PV-energised electric one to cut them into logs in the summer. It’d be a lot more work to do it with a handsaw/axe, but it wouldn’t be impossible. Whereas a hand-operated and home reparied air source heat pump, as Steve points out, would be… However, on this one I think my approach wins out on efficiency all ends up, except in relation to my time. But what better thing could I spend time doing?
– The preceding is a small example of the seasonal work regimens mentioned by Pete – an important consideration
– The wildfire regimes also mentioned by Pete is another important issue, relating also to questions of livestock, greenhouse gases and rewilding in Monbiot’s wider arguments (eg. it’s not necessarily a great idea to rewild to scrub, only for it to go up in a massive conflagration). I only touch on it briefly in my book. I found William Bond’s book ‘Open Ecosystems’ informative on this & other issues.
– Interesting apparent differentiation regarding woodfire policies between Sweden & Norway emerging in the comments. Any further reflections? Also Kim mentions the high cost of electricity … interesting given that the Scandinavian countries are the envy of the world in terms of renewable energy (72% of primary energy consumption in Norway, and 53% in Sweden) – hence perhaps the pioneering of manufactured food there. But what’s the story behind the high prices?
– Talking of Scandinavia, I have an interest in the spruce-birch forest swidden pioneered in Finland (doesn’t everyone?) We’ve touched on it here before, but please do keep me updated with any info on this
– Thanks Diogenes for the voice of experience of air source heat pumps
– Are ground source heat pumps the way to go instead? I dunno. I watched a neighbour having one installed and thought there’s a BIG fossil energy payback on that darned thing…
– …though having said that, I’ve spent the whole day working in the digger and dumper to make a reservoir, which I hope will payback in terms of better surface water management on our site. And judging how my lungs now feel, yes I’d say diesel is worse than woodsmoke…
– …agree though that where we’re at in the world right now doesn’t suggest that PM from wood is too big an issue to be worrying about. It kinda makes you wonder if the ecomodernists are getting a bit transhumanist.
– Thanks Joel for spreading the word. Good to hear of the sleeves rolled up attitude of the farmworkers. I get some comfort from that too…
– …though talking of sleeves rolled up, I went through an old clay field drain in the digger today which I’m going to have to sort out one way or another. I gather they were installed around here mostly by Napoleonic prisoners of war. Now *that* was work…
– Regarding the dodginess of news sources, I’d be interested to know where people here turn in the media to get worthwhile and reliable news. Because frankly I’m desperate…
– Joel’s point about local farmers siding with people using the land is very interesting. I want to come back to this and keep a watching brief on how this issue plays out in different places. ‘They might not give up ownership but they’ll have us on the land’. Hmm, well it’s a start – this could be a case of playing a long game.
– To James’s point about state-corporate relations being intertwined from the outset, yes – strong agree. I make this point in my book and have had a bit of pushback about it (admittedly mostly just from Twitter blowhards) but failure to appreciate the statist origins of capitalism is one of that doctrines’ great victories. On Twitter I was dismissed as a Marxist for making the point. Ha! One of its main exponents was Fernand Braudel, as a *critique* of Marxism. And I do like a good critique of Marxism…
– I’ll see about extending the edit comments timeout a little … but not too much. So choose your words wisely! I don’t mind tidying up the odd comment myself if you let me know what’s happened, so long as it doesn’t happen too often.
– Thanks Clara, John, Frank & others for info about rocket stoves and other matters.
– Finally, on the matter of the class aspects of woodstoves – and the question of ‘property not land’ – here’s a song by Mischief Brew I like that seems curiously appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwYxnpoB3gc
I figure just letting people read my multiple tyops is fine. (The best online comment management I know of is over on Dreamwidth, but I don’t think it would make sense to mirror your blog there.)
I’ve been listening to a podcast recently by the Byline Times. I’m not sure I agree with all their takes, but at least they aren’t funded by advertising. I have also added some podcasts that are, essentially, anarchists ranting about current events. Beyond that, I understand the Financial Times is reasonably good for reporting actual facts rather than propaganda or clickbait. Al-Jazeera English is said to be quite good, and some of the Irish newspapers. I get some of my news through Mastodon the way I used to get quite a bit through Twitter, but haven’t myself managed to build a decent daily habit around news consumption. I do subscribe to my local council’s weekly emails, and while these are more like press releases than news, they are occasionally very useful. So I’ll be interested in other people’s responses to this question!
I went to the allotment (located in a neighbouring borough) yesterday late afternoon with several bags of stolen leaves on my bike trailer, and it was very apparent just how much difference various traffic-calming measures make to my immediate environs.
…and yes, surely the biggest issue with ground source heat pumps (aka earth battery or climate battery when hippies build them for greenhouses) is that you have to dig a big old hole. The colder the topsoil gets in winter, the deeper the hole needs to be. And like rocket mass heaters, the systems need to be appropriately “tuned” — the right diameter of tubing, the right length of tubing, the right strength of fan — or they get very inefficient indeed. This is one reason I prefer trombe walls.
I am (still) thinking of building a solar dehydrator for the allotment, heated by an array of cans either painted black or blackened with soot from the fire (though black tubing and black wire mesh are also options, if I understand correctly). If I eventually go with a downdraft model it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to hook up the outflow to the shed (or maybe the greenhouse, but that would be quite silly, as the vents open anyway in winter sun so any excess warm air won’t help all that much, it’s the 16 hours of darkness in the cold that’s the issue), at which point I could fairly easily figure out whether there’s enough difference in temperature to affect thermal comfort. But one of this winter’s overdue projects is Building A New Shed, and if I’m doing that, incorporating a Trombe wall (preferably with multiple valves so it can run in either cooling or heating mode) seems like a bit of a no-brainer. I suppose I could also include a southeast-facing can panel for warming it up quickly in the early morning.
The thing about all these passive solar measures is that they aren’t much trouble at all once installed, and they make it that much easier to use (scarce, labour-intensive) wood for cooking rather than heating. My main allotment doesn’t have a lot of wood available (though I am letting one of the squirrel-seeded hazels stay put for coppicing purposes), and one of the intended uses of the solar dehydrator will be for faster drying of kindling materials.
I’m not sure whether the highest-tech parts of can panel heaters are the glass or the tubing. But if we end up in such a low-tech situation that I cannot buy window glass, I daresay there will be one heck of a population crash, and any survivors will be able to scavenge windshield glass and various types of tubing readily enough. Meanwhile I will probably use polycarbonate and accept the efficiency hit, because it’s a material I already have and it’s easier to work with.
@Kathryn
Have you tried window fitters for glass?
They throw away the old double glazed units that they take out and replace. They are usually happy for you to take the glass away.
The double glazed units are pretty heavy but work well against heat loss.
Building sites are another good place for plywood boarding ect to make the box. It’s crazy what gets chucked into a skip on building sites!!!!
With the “can panel heater”, have you thought about beer cans? (Aluminium, so good at absorbing/transferring heat)
They are easy to get hold of and stack nicely. Just have to cut the tops and bottoms off. I have used a can opener for the tops but the bottoms are a bit more tricky.
And if you are super picky and go for Guinness only, they are already painted black.
I did collect all the bits to make one but then got distracted by other projects.
Regarding the greenhouse. Are you allowed to dig down into the allotment? Just thinking that if you could sink the greenhouse a couple of feet into the ground, this might help keep it warm. (It might also fill up with rain water as well I guess)
There is an article in Low Tech Magazine about sunken greenhouses in the USSR.
@Kathryn
Link to low tech magazine, though I think you follow it already.
Regarding sheds, have you thought about making a shed out of old doors? I saw a cool one once.
Again, quite easy to get hold of old ones. They are usually more substantial that shed panels and some have glass panels that would get some light into the shed.
Happy foraging.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cultivating-subtropical-plants-in-freezing-temperatures.html
Hi John
Yes, I do skip-dive for various materials, but I’m a little leery of using window frames with lead paint for a dehydrator I might want to use for food. I do have lots of tonic water cans (I don’t drink beer, and in any case we wouldn’t drink it at the allotment before cycling home). Punching holes in the bottoms should be sufficient, slowing the air down so it heats up more is good.
I am aware of Low-Tech magazine. The greenhouse is already built and I am not up for doing major modifications. Sunken greenhouses aren’t much good at our latitude unless you can build them into a south-facing hillside, as the sun is never far enough overhead in winter. But I do keep a hot compost bin inside the greenhouse year-round, and build hotbeds (in discarded loft water tanks) in early spring.
We don’t drive, which limits our ability to move materials so much, and storage space for collecting the right number and size of offcuts is also extremely limited. Moving straight timber on a bike trailer is substantially easier than moving doors, I know from experience. We do have three glass-paneled doors (though of indoor use quality) already at the allotment, which I hope to use, but they are single-glazed so not great in insulation terms, and “light inside the shed” is not necessarily a feature given that theft is also an issue on the site. My current plan is probably to purchase a framing kit and then fill the frame in with pallets etc but I’ll probably change my mind at least three more times before winter.
@Kathryn
The double glazed units are out of old UPVC window frames, so no lead to worry about. Moving them might be an issue for you but they come in all shapes and sizes.
When I put the shout out for beer cans I was inundated!!!!! That probably says something about my friends!!!????
@John
The uPVC window frames are usually extremely heavy, and the frames themselves are quite difficult to attach anything to, both of which are an issue for the context I want to use them in.
Wooden cupboard doors with glass in them, though, are fantastic for my purposes.
@Kathryn
The window fitters have to take the double glazed units out of the frames before they can take the frames out. So it’s just glass that you would get. Then fix the glass the same way as you would polycarbonate sheets. (Bit heavier though)
@John
Thanks for the advice, but:
1) I already have the polycarbonate sheets and may as well use them for something
2) I can cut the polycarbonate with scissors, which is likely to go very badly with any kind of glass
@Kathryn
Sounds like you have it covered.
I’m in the process of making a dehydrater. Used two double glazed units to form the top and front panels. The base, sides and back are made from plywood. Whole think can be flat-packed for when I’m not using it.
I’ve also “robbed” from the local skip, the shelving and shelving supports from an old oven to create the racks.
I’ve got some fine wire mesh. I just need to create some ventilation holes top and bottom and cover them with the mesh to stop the bugs getting in.
It gets up to 60 degrees C on a sunny day. (I stuck an oven thermometer in it to see what happens) I’m not sure if that is hot enough to dehydrate tomatoes etc?
60°C is plenty for most dehydration. There are some things that will work better at a lower temperature with longer processing time, otherwise they form a sort of dry crust on the outside while remaining moist enough inside for spoilage organisms to survive.
Have fun!
@Kathryn or anyone else who can advise.
With my dehydrator, will it work better if I paint the inside surfaces of the box black?
At present, they are white melamine.
I figured that the white would reflect the sun onto the drying veg if the glass wasn’t directly pointing/facing in the direction of the sun. But I could be wrong and the black walls absorbing heat would work better.
Anyone got any experience on this?
@John If the surfaces in question are in the sun, then painting them black (with some kind of food-safe or at least high-temperature paint) will make those surfaces heat up faster, yes.
If you want a dehydrator that still works well when it isn’t quite so sunny, or you want to avoid getting direct sunlight on the food, you probably want a separate solar collector going to a dehydration chamber.
If what you have is literally just a box and you’re planning to poke some holes in the top and bottom, that might not be enough airflow to dehydrate things well, especially in a humid UK climate. But it depends on the size, dimensions and so on of your box, and what you are trying to dehydrate. I dehydrate some things by hanging them in mesh bags from the washing line or a hook in the greenhouse roof. Others need many hours at 50°C in a regulated environment.
I suggest getting your shelves sorted, and then doing a trial run with a wet rag and a hygrometer.
Thanks Kathryn.
Lots to consider.
I was going for direct sunlight but have read that this can destroy some of the goodies in the food.
I might put a black (metal) panel in the box to shield the food but which absobes the heat.
Nearly finished the build so field trials are imminent.
To be clear, I don’t mean to misrepresent my country as a total wood-burning utopia. There’s a lot of bureaucracy and rules around woodstoves here too, like regulations that they have to be “clean-burning”, not older than a certain year, etc. How strongly those rules are enforced in practice is another question, I suppose. Maybe some out of touch urbanites would want to restrict them even further, but a total ban seems pretty outlandish to me.
And one possible difference with Sweden could be that Sweden has historically been more urbanized than Norway, with more people living in apartments. Like the rest of the rich world, Norway is also very urbanized now, but there’s still an ideal of maintaining settlement in “the districts”, as they’re usually called. To an extent this is reflected in actual policy, but there’s also been a lot of centralization of services like police, regional hospitals and so on in recent years, which is one driver of the rural protest vote for the aforementioned Center Party.
“But what’s the story behind the high prices?”
Well, that’s a complicated and contentious topic. I think the short version would be “politics/capitalism and weather”. That is, we do produce a lot of hydro power, but we’re also part of the European electricity market, so trends there affect our domestic prices. As you might expect, a lot of people towards the populist/nationalist side of things are less than happy about this state of affairs. Meanwhile, others like the Green Party push for even more integration, so we can serve as “Europe’s green battery”, as they like to put it.
We’re also at the mercy of the weather, since fluctuations in rainfall have a strong impact on how much power we can produce in any given year. And on the demand side, a milder winter will lead to less heating and so less demand, while a colder winter would drive prices up.
“worthwhile and reliable news.”
I’m not sure such a thing exists!!!!
All news is edited to put a particular opinion forward. The stories behind the headlines are when it gets tricky to wade through propaganda.
News is as much about what is not written about than what is.
I take it all with a pinch of salt these days.
The BBC is still my first port of call even though I know I am being “played”.
“Property not land” doesn’t really make any sense at all, at least for material property (as opposed to, say, intellectual property). Things exist in places. Property takes up physical space.
(Why yes, I’m decluttering ahead of a house inspection next week, or at least commenting here while avoiding decluttering… the conflict in my head between “I have not used this potentially useful thing and don’t really have space for it” and “in five or ten or fifteen years, this thing might be completely unobtainable” is most unpleasant.)
People, too, live in places. I think there is a sort of caricature of this where some people live and work and travel in identical square box studio apartments in identical cities and use identical airports to get between them; and there is also a caricature in the expectation that moving every six months or year because your rent has gone up (again) or because your crappy part-time job with the most hours out of your collection of crappy part-time jobs has moved to another part of the city (again) is “normal” rather than disruptive at best and potentially quite traumatic. I moved 17 times before the age of 32 and haven’t moved since, making this particular shared rented house the one in which I’ve spent the longest portion of my life. But even before then, I lived in another house in this part of London, and before that I was in a flat further in but had friends out here and spent a lot of time here. I’ve been walking around parks in this bit of London since 2005 and I’m still finding new-to-me patches of various edible plants.
Here are a couple suggestions for sources of news (based in the US). While I don’t necessarily agree with all of their political views, they tend to go much deeper into the issues than the mainstream media narratives.
Consortium News
‘Independent Investigative Journalism and Political Review – Since 1995’
founded by journalist Robert Parry
‘As one of the reporters who helped expose the Iran-Contra scandal for The Associated Press in the mid-1980s, I was distressed by the silliness and propaganda that had come to pervade American journalism. I feared, too, that the decline of the U.S. press foreshadowed disasters that would come when journalists failed to alert the public about impending dangers.’
https://consortiumnews.com/
ScheerPost
founded by Robert Scheer, former columnist for the LA Times
‘ScheerPost is an award-winning, independent news organization that focuses on progressive politics and human rights issues that the mainstream media misses…
three pillars that define our journalism:
A commitment to peace and the anti-war movement.
A commitment to economic, social, racial and gender equality.
A commitment to climate change awareness as a result of capitalism.
ScheerPost dot com
Well Chris knows where I live with my wife children and wood burner
Is it appropriate there?
Well when we moved in like our diesel cars it seemed so.
But of course firewood is provided by local traders often for cash unlike electricity and heat pumps so part of me wonders if the real objection might be to the informal economy rather than burning wood.
It also goes without saying that it works perfectly well with or without the electricity being on unlike a heat pump or gas boiler
Well Chris knows where I live with my wife children and wood burner
Is it appropriate there?
Well when we moved in like our diesel cars it seemed so.
But of course firewood is provided by local traders often for cash unlike electricity and heat pumps so part of me wonders if the real objection might be to the informal economy rather than burning wood.
Thanks for further comments. Just to mention I might be a bit less active here, at least in the comments, over the next little while with an uptick in family caring responsibilities, farm work and a proliferating set of podcasts and presentations coming my way. On the latter front, keep an eye on this site’s soon-to-be-updated Events and Research/Publications pages for what’s on. Oh, and if you’re minded to write a review of my new book on Amazon, GoodReads etc. please do!
Good points about the HFCs in heat pumps. Underscores the folly of unnecessary banning of woodstoves.
But where to draw the line? John B, I’ll resist your invitation for me to dox you! How might it work if instead of central government diktat, such decisions were made by neighbours within neighbourhood forums and other kinds of direct decision-making or mediation? It could prove to be a lot of work, but I think there are benefits in people learning how to actually talk to their neighbours – especially around points of disagreement. Very good point also about the way the high-tech option closes down informal local economies.
Thanks for the further info about electricity, Kim. I think a lot of the ecomodernist case hangs on long-term downward trends in electricity price (and upward trends in supply) to fund all those EVs, heat pumps, microbial burgers and what have you. Interesting if price is trending high in relation to wider European demand at present.
Re property & land, my take on Erik Petersen’s lyric is pretty much along the lines of your comment, Kathryn. Alienation from land-based practical work into at best ersatz celebrations of it drawing from the excess capital flows of Everywheresville that turn land into mere property. But maybe there are other interpretations.
And thanks for the news source suggestions – some that I already use sporadically and others that are new to me. Feels like it’s time to wean myself off The Guardian after many decades of loyal readership. A shout out from me also of course for The Land Magazine!
Because of where I live, I do in fact have the legal right to gather a certain amount of firewood every day from Epping Forest, consisting of fallen dead wood only and not exceeding a certain thickness.
If even a tenth of the people with this right actually did so, I think it wouldn’t last long — if nothing else, because there wouldn’t be any dead wood left. I’m sure if it were necessary for heating their homes, people would take more than legally allowed… and that wouldn’t last long, either. The laws predate the expansion of London into this area.
But I’m almost completely unfamiliar with using wood for anything more than recreational cooking and heating. I did spend a couple of weeks in 2007 using a Rayburn on a croft in Scotland and I got on with it well enough (though the back boiler made the water scarily hot), but I don’t really have any mental concept of how much wood is enough to heat a kitchen for a winter, or how much land is needed to grow that much wood without becoming unsustainable.
I suspect most people living in cities have a similar disconnect, and not only with firewood. I am at least aware that I don’t have a good idea of it.
The croft was a strange situation. It was a sort of experiment in off-grid living with rotational visitors and a serious void in leadership due to the initiator being sectioned for mental health reasons… when I got there, activity levels went up markedly because I a) made a big pot of tea every morning and b) made a good hot meal every night. The ragged and random assortment of people willing to try it out, in this case, hadn’t been managing to actually eat enough calories to focus on anything much and were sortof subsisting on instant coffee and oatmeal and cigarettes and occasionally frying up some eggs from the chickens. Carrots and spuds and greens that had been planted in spring were available, but not really getting eaten. My other main contribution was instituting a “one mug per person per day” rule where I asked people to please keep track of their tea mug rather than using a new one every time, which cut the washing up by a substantial amount.
It’s easy to be critical of that level of disorganisation and listlessness, but I’ve certainly had the experience myself of overdoing things at the allotment or on a foraging walk, getting home at well past hungry o’clock, and simply not having the mental energy to actually cook anything. In my case I can rummage around in the freezer for “one I made earlier” in these situations or even, decadent urban-dwelling metropolitan that I am, order a takeaway. Not so easy in rural Scotland. My experience on that experiment was instructive in terms of what happens when people neglect their energy and nutritional needs, but I am also aware that I was only able to improve matters because the firewood and the food were already there: earlier participants in the project had had the foresight to cut some trees down and dig a vegetable plot.
> Feels like it’s time to wean myself off The Guardian after many decades of loyal readership
You won’t regret it! Gave it up myself in 2018.
https://coveringclimatenow.org/event/climate-changes-everything-creating-a-blueprint-for-media-transformation-2/
Looks like they are trying to get their story ( ies ) down pat .
Could this be called a conspiracy ?
Just to bang on a bit more about rocket stoves and wood burners.
I’m also half way through a project to rig up a thermoelectric generator (TEG) to work off the heat from the rocket stove. Hope to generate enough electricity to run some LED lights.
Not sure George would approve!
Do let us know how you get on with this! I know of the Bio-Lite (I think?) stove available commercially that I think does something similar but I’m not, I’ll admit, sure how it actually works.
@Kathryn
Yes, the bio-lite has a TEG inside it.
With a TEG, if you heat one side and keep the other cool, it generates (a small) amount of electricity.
I’ve built a “bank” of 10 together and plan to strap it to the side of the Rocket Stove and see what happens. (They can get destroyed if they get too hot. Over 100 degrees C), so it’s a “Goldilocks”.
I’ll let you know how I get on.
I think I need to take a day off work and start playing!!!!!
I have mixed feelings on TEGs. On the one hand, they use materials that are not the kind of thing I would want to be trying to source on my own, and there are significant technical challenges (like making sure the differential expansion of materials doesn’t break the casing, and all the various issues with overheating etc).
On the other hand, heat is very easy to produce, and electricity is incredibly convenient, and high-quality TEGs should last decades — far longer than the batteries they might charge, at any rate — and the materials are relatively recoverable afterward; they should even be repairable in a way that, say, microchips kindof aren’t.
So I feel like they aren’t exactly going to form the backbone of a low-energy future, but they could be a pretty nice add-on.
@Kathryn.
Yes, TEG are an inefficient way of producing electricity and are not going to be a big player in electricity generation.
However, if you’ve got a wood burner going anyway, as a heat source, why not stick a TEG on the side and run a few LEDs?
If we ever get to the point where the National Grid can no longer be relied upon, then TEG/LEDs might be a favourable alternative to candles on those cold winter nights!
Incidentally, those stove fans you see around, work off of TEGs.
@Kathryn
There are people on YouTube who have instructions on how to make D.I.Y TEGs, if you are interested.
I’ve never quite understood the stance against woodburners.
The issue with fossil fuels (partly) is that you are releasing carbon that was locked away millenia ago, thus raising the current atmospheric carbon level and contributing to global warming. If I coppice my trees and burn them, I am releasing carbon that was stored in the tree 10 years ago. It’s a short term cycle that over a larger timespan doesn’t increase the carbon in the atmosphere.
Yes, you can have inefficient burning in a woodstove, which many people are guilty of, and in an urban environment that may contribute to higher levels of harmful particulates. However, that’s not a problem with woodburners per se, it’s an issue with the incorrect use of them. And, arguably, a small issue compared with fossil fuel burning in cars and industry.
I think the legitimate issues with woodburners are best summed up as follows:
1) Localised particulate pollution is bad for people’s lungs. This is especially true in densely populated areas with frequent high-pressure temperature inversions (so towns and cities in many river valleys), or in situations where people use wood or other combustible solids to cook indoors without adequate ventilation. Yes, this is partly a matter of improper use, but humans are quite good at not using things properly
2) In a fireplace with a chimney to remove smoke from living areas, quite a lot of the heat goes up and out the chimney too, making wood inefficient in terms of the heat produced Vs the heat we actually experience (though…compared to what? Cars also produce a lot of waste heat…)
3) If everyone tried to do all their heating and cooking with wood, we would clear the forests (including precious old-growth) rather quickly; there certainly isn’t currently the amount of managed coppice woodland to allow for such use. This is a land access issue.
4) Actual firewood that is actually sold to consumers for use in cooking and heating is often of dubious provenance.
None of these problems are insurmountable, but to a certain sort of technologist, they look like technical rather than social problems.
I do think fossil fuels are worse. But while it certainly isn’t a question of “electricity always good, wood always bad”, I think “wood-burning is entirely unproblematic” is also not really accurate.
Having less than 20% water content in the wood is a big factor/requirement for an efficient burn.
Well seasoned wood is a must.
https://euobserver.com/green-economy/157364
So they are removing a wind farm to get at the coal underneath .
It’s what happens when wishful thinking comes up against cold reality.
With a woodburner – or other sorts of fire, in order to get the chimney to ‘draw’ properly and prevent tar etc from condensing in the flue, which can give you a chimney fire the flue gas needs to be at a particular temperature.
I suppose that you could have a fan to ‘force’ the draft but you will still have the tar etc issue.
Rocket stoves shouldn’t have a problem with tar in the flue, since the combustion is more complete, according to this:
‘So how does a rocket stove work? The rocket stove is built from refractive brick which keeps the thermal energy in the combustion chamber and thus in the combustion process. The burn chamber is designed to maintain the highest combustion temperature possible which ensures that all of the products of combustion are burned. Rocket stoves are designed to burn sticks and small woody biomass. As a handful of sticks have a higher surface area to volume ratio (more edge) than an equivalent-sized log, you get better oxygen mixing and better combustion. Essentially, the rocket stove is designed to provide the perfect ratio of oxygen to fuel to achieve what chemists call stoichiometric combustion.
After the combustion process is complete the combustion products rise up the flue. Because all of the fuel has been consumed the gases are clean and we can now remove the heat without being overly concerned about condensing nasty products such as creasotes, tar and soot. Creasotes, tar and soot are usually the result of incomplete combustion.’
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2010/04/07/rockets-that-dont-fly/
I’ve used 4″ PLASTIC Soil pipe as the flue on my rocket stove!!!!!! It gets a bit “soft” at the horizontal bit coming out the side of the rocket stove, (I wrap a damp cloth round it) but the vertical section is cool enough to touch.
The flu gas temperature is quite low as all the heat has gone into the rocket stove body.
I’ve created my insulated burn chamber by casting a cement fondu/perlite refactory mix around a cardboard former and then removing the cardboard.
It’s all about creating a well insulated burn chamber, so that all the chemicals in the wood are consumed at there different combustion temperatures. Carbon being the last to go, hence charcoal.
Rocket Stoves burn wood but that about as far as the similarities go with a conventional woodburning stove.
https://heritagemachines.com/news/1900-hot-air-engine-runs-again/
Stirling Engine anyone?
Chris has described this technology as a sort of Godwins Law, at some stage we end up mentioning them
https://heritagemachines.com/news/1900-hot-air-engine-runs-again/
Stirling Engine anyone?
From what I can remember from enginering college the inefficiency and lack of power killed these engines ( they do make a stove top fan to help circulate warmed air around a room
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3FPHbImAoq0 ) ,
a gassifire engine is far more efficient ( burning smoke instead of gasoline )
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/09/01/property-owners-failing-comply-new-energy-rules-face-prison/
To the Brits , is this true or BS ?
BS
First I’ve heard of it
Sounds like soundbite scare-mongering to me, but worth keeping an eye on.
One of the key tactics the Tories seem to use is the strategic U-turn. They’ll float the idea of something truly horrible in the media, and if popular support against it is strong enough, they’ll change it at the last minute to something that’s still very bad but not quite as horrible, but which people haven’t had time to prepare arguments against.
What’s worse than requiring property owners (i.e. landlords) to improve the energy efficiency of properties? Requiring them to improve energy efficiency but not do enough to make much difference either way, and doing it in such a way that tenants pay more.
In this case I would guess they’ll do something weird like making local councils responsible for the percentage of energy-inefficient buildings in a given area but not actually increasing either their funding or their legal powers to do anything about it, and certainly not doing anything that would inconvenience buy-to-let landlords by strengthening tenancy rights. Council tax (usually paid by tenants) then goes up to cover the costs of implementing some kind of (mostly ineffective) scheme, then in every Labour constituency in the country the Tories run on some variation of “your Labour council just puts council tax up every year without providing any more services to you, the taxpayer” as if the Tories would do anything else. But that’s really just a guess on my part.
Wondering if others here find this piece by Bill McKibben to be mostly shaped by the ecomodernist perspective.
McKibben doesn’t mention that the rapid and dramatic build out of “renewable energy” technology and infrastructure being advocated for by the mainstream “energy transition” narrative would result in a steep increase in fossil fuel consumption over the next decade and more, thus defeating the whole ostensible point of the exercise. Then again, hardly anyone understands this point, or why it is so.
To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower?
The degrowth movement makes a comeback.
By Bill McKibben
July 5, 2023
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/to-save-the-planet-should-we-really-be-moving-slower
Degrowth can never happen under today’s financial system , because todays system is founded on debt , ” money ” being borrowed from tomorrow to pay today’s bills and today’s bills are so massive that with today’s gross domestic product of the world of can never be repaid without it , ( one trillion in us vehicle loans alone ) Over a trillion in credit card debt ,30 + trillion in us federal government debt , unknown trillions in world debt ,slowing growth slows taxes and makes the debt un payable , they could increase interest rates which always causes economies to stall and unemployment to rocket , the only other way out is to print money to pay debt distroying the value of the currency in the process , either way we are in for hard times .
“Degrowth can never happen under today’s financial system , because todays system is founded on debt , ” money ” being borrowed from tomorrow to pay today’s bills and today’s bills are so massive that ….”
While this may be true, it’s also true that perpetual and exponential economic growth in a finite planet cannot happen under today’s ecological and material systems. So such growth will come to an end. And degrowth is the best basic strategy (a strategy with many strategy proposals) for transitioning to a post-growth economy which is inevitable anyway, and coming soon to a theater near you (and me, and everyone else).
Once the ecomodernists eliminate people’s ability to feed themselves and keep warm, with the studge factories up and running, ecomodernist engineers can focus on what really matters – building flying cars.
Drones are okay for an aerial studge and soma supply system but flying cars would eliminate the need for roads. They could be torn up, saving newly genetically engineered (CRISPR) woolly mammoths from traffic deaths. Talk about rewilding! Sabre toothed cats, short faced bears, mastodons, the possibilities are endless !
Ecorealists are such a buzzkill.
@Greg Reynolds –
LOL!
You missed out mining the moon , teraforming Mars and building the USS Enterprise , oh and downloading the brains of the super rich into computers .
Thanks for keeping the comments going. I’m a bit short on time to participate much just now, but I’ll have more posts coming soon. Meanwhile, just a couple of remarks:
@Greg – no more of these jokes, they’re listening 🙂
@Ernie – interesting comment which I hope to come back to. I liked Deneen’s ‘Why Liberalism Failed’, excepting the odd passage of reactionary-dad bloviating. He wrote (and I agree) “A rejection of the world’s first and last remaining ideology [i.e. liberalism] does not entail its replacement with a new and doubtless not very different ideology …. A better course will consist in smaller, local forms of resistance: practices more than theories, the building of resilient new cultures against the anticulture of liberalism” (pp.19-20).
However, I suspect you’re right that this kind of thing easily gets appropriated into mere demagoguery serving the interests of capital (witness people like John Michael Greer framing people like Donald Trump as pro-working class). So how to make genuine political space for those smaller, local forms of resistance to emerge seems to me a critical question.
One important step, I think, is to avoid the stereotypical, caricature-based narrative of the metropolitan liberal elite barista as some kind of existential threat to the honest working class buy-to-let landlord. (Not my turn of phrase but when I heard it I laughed.) And that, in turn, involves being honest and up front about land (sorry, “property”) access issues.
Road resurfacing work here today and I’m a bit worried about the state of the windows, which are rattling something fierce. I suppose I should be grateful that at least the road surfaces are being maintained; of course, if cars weren’t so heavy then much less of this would be necessary in the first place. Meanwhile we have a house inspection scheduled for Wednesday, so I am in a panic (nothing like an agent with a good financial incentive to throw you out of your home being the person who decides whether you can stay to calm the mind and soothe the spirit…) but have learned a new verb, to “scurryfunge” or “scurryfunge” which is to engage in frantic tidying and cleaning before the onset of visitors. The provenance seems unclear but it is a splendid word.
On the bright side I did find my spare secateurs and a decent pair of leather gardening gloves; and a sample of our purple potatoes, and our Uchiki Kuri squash, were each awarded a ribbon in the allotment show yesterday. And I dodged the Tomato Drama entirely.
The second spelling should be scurrifunge but autocarrot was a bit too enthusiastic.
Anyway, back to scurryfungeing.
I’m not giving up my fire. It’s not our only source of heat but we can cook on our wood burning stove when we need to. And we’ve been planting trees for firewood – some short rotation coppice and some more traditional coppice. We’re also planting hedge and laying some existing hedge (I think of hedge as a linear coppice) and replanting hedgerow trees that could be pollarded. In time (probably past my time) we should be able to provide for our needs.
As a society I can’t see any way to provide current levels of energy for this many people that isn’t self terminating. Unless or until we address that we’ll keep destroying the world with our next brilliant idea that we’ll collectively take on because we find the alternative (i.e. having less energy) too appalling to contemplate.
Ok, late to the party, so some rehashing will ensue:
Burning wood- No one has yet mentioned Masonry heaters, or Russian stoves. This is old technology, but basically similar to the rocket mass heaters others have mentioned. We heat with one, and the key key is to burn with plenty of air, so we do a hot, short burn in the morning, ( results in stoichiometric combustion as Steve L mentions) so almost no smoke or creosote. Then the long serpentine flue path through a large mass of bricks captures quite a lot of the heat before exiting the chimney. Access to bricks, firebricks and appropriate mortars is all that is needed to build one, and if fired properly, will last many decades. The brick wall is still warm the next morning, and quite nice to stand against on winter mornings.
solar food ( or other things) dehydrating:
Here is the design I used, and have been quite happy with it. The homesteaders who developed the design also have a wealth of info on their website, link in my blog entry.
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2015/07/
Threshers: Erik F- care to share your design? I built one also, but the performance could use some optimizing.
News sources: good luck with that. In my bookmarks, I have over 40 “news” websites, ranging in focus and political leanings. In another folder, I have the “politics and issues” bookmarks, typically sites that take deeper dives, and there are over 60 there. One just has to take averages sometimes. We have entered a time when trust in institutions and “truth” in general has been lost, partially through technology enabled echo chambers and unfiltered publication, and weaponization of same.
I might share my faves later.
Energy in general:
We talk about heating and whether wood or heat pumps are the best choice, but the real discussion should be about a transition of all housing stock to a standard similar to the passive house, especially in temperate or colder climes. Granted, it will take decades, but all new housing could be required to meet this standard immediately if the will was there. (stop digging the hole……)
It’s kind of a third rail for discussing our current predicament, but if I recall his view, I part ways with Chris a bit and don’t think the earth can sustain 8+ billion humans after fossil fuels. It’s an unpleasant prospect. Carrying capacities of all the various biomes vary, but in general, once the fossil subsidy is gone, and we are limited to the annual solar budget, populations will decline. And while small farms are the best response, we’ll likely try everything else first.
good post.
@Steve C.
Thanks for the links.
Totally agree with your last paragraph. The last sentence in particular!!!!
@Steve C.
Like the look of the solar dehydrater. Is the underside covered in corrugated polycarbonate sheets?
Think I’m trying to reinvent the wheel with mine. I guess other people have already done the hard yards, so think I will copy yours.
What can you dry in it? Will it dehydrate tomatoes for example?
On a slightly different tack, has anyone come across a system for sucking air out of a kilner jar (or similar)? Been thinking about vacuum packing to stop the decomposition of food.
A lid with a valve on it so that a suction pump can draw out the air.
Not sure if this would be beneficial anyway???
Hi John;
Your question led to to go to the originator’s website, only to find that it appears to be no more. They gave construction details and design principals for same. My blog post touched on some of this.
Briefly- Top of lid is twin wall polycarbonate. Bottom of lid is thin aluminum flashing, painted black both sides. Food tray frames are cedar, but any rot resistant wood ( not treated !) would do. Screens are SS since food will be on them. Under the food trays the support base is galvanized corrugated roof panels.
We dry apple slices, peaches ( watch out, high sugar items can scorch) blanched greens like collards and kale, mint and other herbs. There are books on food dehydrating out there with tips on prep.
Tomatoes will work if they have more firm flesh, but generally, are harder to do on the slope. A silicon sheet is good for very wet food that might stick to the screens.
I hope this is enough to give it a go.
I’ve never used a vacuum sealer, but cheaper versions with a manual pump are out there.
good luck
Thanks Steve C.
“only to find that it appears to be no more”.
That’s good to know. I thought I was doing something wrong!!!
You’ve got me thinking!
My shed is corrugated sheet .
I’m thinking of making individual trays with their own lids etc and sticking a bit of the the same corrugated roof profile on the bottom of the trays. Then sitting them directly on the shed roof. Save me making a base frame and if I keep the trays to 2′ x 2′ frames, they shouldn’t be too difficult to get on and off the roof.
The pitch is about 20 degrees but if the food keeps sliding down, I’m thinking of laying some oven wire shelving on the stainless steel mesh to stop the slide.
Wow, stainless steel mesh is expensive!!!!!!
I’ll go looking on the web for suction lids and pumps.
@Steve C
Do you have any recommendations of books on all things dehydrating?
Or anyone else for that matter?
News sources:
(in case anybody is still looking at this post)
give this a whirl.
Use the filter for traffic and country to make it less overwhelming.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com
Couple of things relating to Steve C’s post (also thanks for the news recommendations, Steve).
I’m interested to know what passive house people do for hot water? My feeling is that things like passive houses & masonry stoves are quite costly options, but possible for new builds – not so much with existing stock?
Regarding population, I’d say there’s a difference between whether a post-fossil world *could* sustain 8 billion+ people (to which I think the answer is possibly yes) and whether it *will* sustain them (to which I think the answer is probably no). The critical issue is political choices rather than ‘carrying capacity’ as such.
Are masonry stoves and passive houses possible in a post fossil world of population collapse? Probably yes, but not in the collapsing parts.
Solar hot.water will work quite well in lots of circumstances but I suspect the answer to what passive homes do about hot water is “use less of it because it’s difficult to produce”. Lots more standing at the sink with a washcloth, lots less soaking in the bath.
Things like the flat-pack soar hot water units from SolarisKit are interesting (see https://www.solariskit.com/ for more details) but not very practical for a rented terraced house in London; if we’re going to do plumbing my higher priority is water catchment and a proper outdoor tap.. But they’d be absolutely fine for more spread-out applications and when I have daydreamed about having a summer kitchen at the allotment they have figured highly in my plans. Rigging something up with a sufficient length of black hosepipe and lots of discarded plastic bottles (essentially a renewable resource here 🙁 and the litter problem isn’t even that bad compared to some places) would also work well enough for many applications (washing up yes, maybe not so much for drinking), but again takes up space. I’ve always been a bit dubious about the black plastic hanging solar shower things available in camping shops but they do keep selling them so I guess people keep using them. I don’t know how useful they are in winter.
I used to have a “solar kettle” — essentially one of those glass vacuum tubes like the solar cookers, with a stand and a thermometer and so so — which worked well but eventually broke through mistreatment. However a (painted) black steel single-walled drinking water bottle inserted into a 2L glass jar from IKEA will get the water very hot in full sun — enough so that it’s important not to tighten the lid. The only reason I don’t use this setup (and some appropriate oven mitts) to make my morning pot of tea now is that the appropriately sunny shelf in the back garden isn’t sunny until the afternoon. One of the projects on my list is to fix this, however; and also to ring up a cork stopper lid with a short compost thermometer and some kind of steam valve. That way I could fill it at night before going to bed, and make my tea at a reasonable hour of the morning…
We use solar hot water tubes – they work well in the summer, not all that well in the spring/autumn and not at all well in the winter, which is where the woodstoves come in. No doubt hot water on tap is another substance that we’ve become accustomed to overusing in modern life, but I just wanted to raise the issue because hot water is an important output of a woodstove that a passive house doesn’t in itself address. If people are using other energy inputs to get hot water, this needs to be set against the use of wood.
Agreed re: comparing other energy sources to wood rather than pretending passive solar hot water is workable. And of course if the hot water tank is inside the house, that hot water is also potentially an important heat source indoors.
We have an ancient gas boiler with a hot water tank. Even with a jacket on, that water tank heats up the airing cupboard very nicely and keeps the rest of the bathroom toasty and warm too. While I would probably still be thermally comfortable at a lower temperature, I am concerned that when the time comes to replace the boiler we will lose the hot water tank and the bathroom will develop the mold problems I’ve seen in so many other houses that used to have a hot tank in the bathroom but don’t any more. I like having a warm cupboard for starting seeds, too.
Which seems a long way from “woodstoves are fine in some circumstances actually”… but the widespread assumption that modern humans are just wimps for wanting to have conveniently warm homes is one that gets on my nerves. I consider myself and my spouse reasonably healthy, but the thing that made us finally put the heating on last winter (rather than just wandering around with hot water bottles) was waking up in a 13°C bedroom with an asthma attack one too many nights in a row. Being too cold for too long is also not great for cardiovascular health.
Hot water on tap is both a convenient luxury and also really useful for things that make a substantial difference to good health and quality of life, like being able to clean clothes, dishes and bodies properly. So it would be good to figure out how to do it reliably and well using passive methods at higher latitudes. My greenhouse at the allotment quickly reaches the mid-20s on a sunny winter day, so I imagine that with a large enough solar collection area and enough insulation for the storage tank, something could be rigged up that would at least help in the context of lower daylight hours during the winter months. Geothermal is an option in a lot of places if you can dig a deep enough hole, but that is rather a big “if” unless you happen to live near a hot spring. But I suspect that, as with so many other things, one of the best ways to provide hot water is by storing energy from the summer sun for winter use — and that will often look like a woodburner. And even “a large enough solar collection area” points away from current urban density and toward something more like a small farm future.
@Kathryn
“I am concerned that when the time comes to replace the boiler we will lose the hot water tank”
If you end up having a gas fired combi boiler fitted, then it’s quite easy to fit a small radiator in the airing cupboard in place of the cylinder.
If gas fired boilers are to be fazed out, then you will need a cylinder if you end up with a heat pump.
The other alternative to a heat pump, is to have electric radiators and a cylinder with immersion heaters. Or no cylinder and electric shower and single point instantaneous electric water heaters on all basins/sinks etc.
This is the likely scenario where combi boilers have already been installed. Most new builds with combi boilers DON’T have a space to fit a cylinder!!!!
@John
Thanks for this. I’m not sure there’s much space for a heat pump either… certainly a ground source one would have to work around plumbing etc in the back garden, and from what I understand air source ones are kindof horrible. I don’t know if I can convince the landlord to put a radiator in the airing cupboard if there’s already one in the bathroom. Also, the hot water tank stays warm (and releases heat) for a lot longer than a radiator would, which does a lot to even out the temperature (we have a timer rather than a thermostat, annoyingly it’s one of the earlier digital timers with two slots per day and heating and hot water can be “off” or “twice” or “once” — I would far prefer the old mechanical ones with a little lever for every 15 minute period, so we could put the heating on for a half hour mid-afternoon as well, but I didn’t install the thing… anyway I imagine that would also change if the boiler were replaced, whether with another boiler or with some other system.)
I have never experienced a shower I liked in an electric shower, but I suppose I’ve only ever used the cheapest ones, and it’s not like our current shower has decent pressure anyway. The little hot-water-on-demand taps seem nifty, I assume they also come with filters or they’d fill up with limescale in approximately twenty seven seconds.
@Chris
“I’m interested to know what passive house people do for hot water? ”
I guess it depends on what you mean by a passive house?
My understanding is that a passive house doesn’t need/use a heat source for space heating but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a heat source for water heating.
I’m guessing a passive house would use electricity for lighting etc. If this is the case then a unvented hot water cylinder with a couple of immersion heaters in would do the job just fine.
The unvented (mains pressure) cylinder could also have a coil in it to connect to solar thermal tubes/panels on the roof. I’ve fitted plenty of these systems in the past.
I’ve had issues with the systems overheating on long hot summers days and what to do with the excess heat once the cylinder is up to temperature. (Lots of call-out/return visits to top up the glycol because it’s vented out the pressure relief valve!!!)
If the house has PV panels, then a better option is to use the electricity generated to power the immersion heaters. There are clever relay boxes these days that can prioritize the cylinder or batteries or whatever you have running.
If you want to go low tech to heat up a washing up bowl’s worth of water, have you ever tried a Kelly Kettle? Quick and easy but don’t use it indoors!!!
I have to say, if it’s 8pm in December and pouring with rain and I need to do a pile of washing up after working outside all day and having a meagre supper of vegetable soup and bread, I’m really not going to want to head outside to mess about in the dark with a Kelly kettle. I love it for allotment use but using it for every bit of hot water I use in a typical day doesn’t bear thinking about. And anyway, that’s still a woodburner; in some ways just a smaller version of a woodstove with a back boiler…and I’d probably have to light a fire anyway to make the soup as I doubt solar panels are going to manage an induction hob in December.
A covered outdoor space is always useful.
@Ksthryn.
“have to say, if it’s 8pm in December and pouring with rain and I need to do a pile of washing up after working outside all day and having a meagre supper of vegetable soup and bread, I’m really not going to want to head outside to mess about in the dark with a Kelly kettle”
Alas, I think this is the reality of a SFF.
Probably, for at least some; though personally if I’m cooking soup I want to heat the washing-up water at the same time.
But a woodstove with a back boiler is still a lovely thing, and not really any harder to make than a Kelly kettle (though it does require more materials).
@Kathryn
A back boiler usually has “primary” water in it. Primary water always stays in the primary circuit but transfers heat to a cylinder of water via pipes and a coil inside the cylinder.
The primary circuit is filled and vented from a “header” tank and the the cylinder has a header tank as well.
All of this “kit” is far more complex than a Kelly Kettle, and is only really a product of the fossil fuel age.
A recent review of ‘Saying NO…’ at Front Porch Republic:
“Resistance to what Smaje calls ecomodernism is necessary. Due to sunk costs, it’s tempting to hasten down the road of modernization we’ve been traveling to find safety from an impending storm. But if we realize there is no shelter at our proposed destination, it would be much better to turn around now and run back toward the farmhouse we left behind.”
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/09/hope-for-a-humane-agricultural-future-a-review-of-saying-no-to-a-farm-free-future/
(The first comment there is an attempted riposte from George Monbiot.)
Hi Chris,
Picking up on your comment about passive houses and masonry heaters.
I suspect masonry heaters are overkill (too big and too expensive) for a well insulated (but not to passive house standard) house.
Rocket mass heaters are a simpler and cheaper approach. It’s well worth reading Ianto Evans and Leslie Jackson’s book. Also Erica and Ernie Wisner’s book.
You could combine a rocket stove mass heater with a back boiler, but it needs to be placed in descending hot exhaust gases, not in the combustion chamber.
Reading these books made me realise just how inefficient conventional wood stoves are.
Re Kelly kettles etc, maybe there are times when it pays to think big: Here’s a short video about how they do hot water in other parts of the world. Basically, you light a fire beneath the water chamber, and that together with the chimney pipe through the centre (which connects to a chimney, unless you’re outside) heats the water in 15 minutes or so. They come in sizes from around 50 litres up to 120, but seem to be getting harder to get hold of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt2WQd1ofPQ&t=615s
@Simon H
There used to be a gas fired version here in the UK but I haven’t seen one for a long time.
They are in effect, large versions of a Kelly Kettle and relatively simple to make. Stainless steel being the best material for longevity.
Hmmmm. Thinking about it, a J shaped rocket stove feed/burn chamber would work well with one.
Not another project for my list!!!!!
Thanks for the tip, John – I’ll look for one in stainless steel.
Just checking out this map it seems that even London has better air quality than almost everywhere in Eastern Europe. Could this be true? Maybe, but my nostrils make me feel confident enough to say that, if it is, I’ll eat my hat (I’m sure it would have a pleasantly smokey flavour). Maybe it’s more complicated than what your senses let on.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2023/sep/20/europes-pollution-divide-see-how-your-area-compares